How owners view brands

Guy Wilkinson

Viability director Guy Wilkinson says that no matter how analytical an owner is, ultimately choosing a hotel brand will depend on past experience, business sense and simple gut instinct

One part of my job is to advise Middle East hotel owners and developers about which chains and brands they should consider for the management of their properties. At our firm, we present our clients with a fairly detailed profile of the different facets of each chain.

This includes considerations like who owns the chain, how many years it’s been operating, how many hotels and rooms it has around the globe and in this region (including their future pipelines), what brands it offers and how they might fit with the client’s vision for his own hotel, what sales and marketing systems it has, etc.

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We encourage our clients to meet with their preferred shortlist of operators, view their PowerPoint presentations, hear their claims and read their brochures, before making a final decision as to the one chain they really like.

We try to be as coldly analytical as possible, and yet the whole process by its very nature remains highly subjective. Even issues that look clear-cut and black and white are in fact subjective. For example, many owners derive their main impressions of one chain or another — positive or negative — from having stayed in one particular hotel.

The fact that an operator manages one beautiful ‘trophy’ property is no guarantee that any other hotels in the chain will be as nice. Vice versa, the fact that one hotel is in desperate need of refurbishment should not tarnish the entire chain, especially as it is probably due to an owner who is reluctant to pay for the renovation, and not an operator decision.

In reality, hotels in our region are really showcases for their owners’ visions, not their operators’. Sure, the operator will be invited in at a typically late stage in the development of a hotel to provide interior design and fit-out standards, but the basic project is typically formulated without the operator’s input.

Therefore, to point to a particular hotel and say it is an outstanding example of one particular brand’s attributes may ever only be partially true — and more often than not, somewhat misleading.

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